80
The layering of styles and perspectives provides a sympathetic insight into the motivations and real life experiences of police officers working within a fundamentally corrupt system.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
The Playlist by Carlos Aguilar
Far from being copraganda, A Cop Movie, the new feature from director Alonso Ruizpalacios (“Güeros,” “Museo”), is a formally daring and incisive deep dive into their performance of authority.
75
Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.
67
A Cop Movie is too gentle to rouse new disdain for an institution currently subject to such piercing critique. It chooses to make the self-consciousness about its subject matter into a twee form of guilty self-awareness, when what’s needed is bitter medicine, or just insights that better challenge our moral certainties.
83
Director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ exciting and unpredictable look at a pair of Mexico City police officers blends documentary and narrative techniques to deliver a refreshing and innovative look at the challenges of modern-day police work — as well as the underlying corruption that makes the most earnest officers vulnerable to a system rigged against them.
90
At times, A Cop Movie seems unnecessarily convoluted in its structure, but by the end, the brilliance of its design becomes clear: This is nothing short of an existential inquiry into what it takes to be a cop.